Important Announcement

9 May, 2020 at 11:36 AM

Through August 2020, Boston University has moved to remote teaching and learning, canceled on-campus activities, and minimized lab research activities. For more information, visit our COVID-19 website.

OutcomesYour master’s degree comes with a side of the world

A graduate degree from BU is your ticket to global opportunities. With comprehensive career development resources at their fingertips, our Economics master’s students have gone on to become cabinet ministers, PhD candidates, investment bankers, and Forbes’ 30 under 30 economists. Nearly 20% of our students have been sponsored by foreign governments, central banks, and Fulbright scholarships. Our graduates work at places like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, the Federal Reserve System, the World Bank, Cornerstone Research, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. They also become entrepreneurs: founding their own start-ups and owning firms such as London Economics International. They are analysts and consultants, researchers and policymakers. Some of them continue their quest for knowledge by pursuing their PhDs at places like Harvard, Chicago, and Princeton.

Niko Skievaski

“How can I maximize value?” is a common question for economists. For Niko Skievaski (GRS’10), it’s a question he’s applied to his career as a whole. “It’s one big constrained optimization problem,” he says. “I’m trying to maximize the amount of value that I’m delivering, and the constraint is time.”

Niko says that’s why he has already held at least 4 jobs—“bouncing between different projects to bring the most value”—since earning a Master of Economics degree at Boston University.

He began at the leading electronic medical record company Epic, where he automated his pricing analyst job in his first month and went on to lead other internal innovation projects, while lecturing on health care economics to Epic’s 7,000+ employees.

After 3 years, he decided he could bring more value elsewhere. Since then, Niko has co-founded 100state, a networking and incubating nonprofit in Madison, Wisconsin, and 100health, a similar organization focusing on health care and health technology. He’s also a co-founder of Vote (Mostly) Online, an absentee voting service; Breadcrumbs, a searchable knowledge management platform (now used by Epic); Redox, an advanced programming interface to facilitate electronic health record sharing; and—maximizing value even more—he finds time to teach economics at Madison College.

Niko says BU was also a value judgment: he didn’t feel he had time for a PhD, and BU is one of only a handful of schools with an economics MA. Above all, BU offered “the tools necessary to actually apply your economics,” he says. “Although I’m not an analyst crunching numbers, I still use these principles on a day-to-day basis,” including the analytics programming Niko has clearly put to good use.

His network from BU has also proved vital. “I still go back to those connections” for support, guidance, and collaboration, Niko says. That includes newer alumni of the program, as well as current students. Niko welcomes them to find him on LinkedIn and see if he can provide connections. Between co-founding two networking organizations, and a whole lot of bouncing, he’s nothing if not connected.